Curious. Was it ever considered that this may be fallout from the decision to hold classes during the campus AFSCME strike back in late November 2013, justification outlined in an impassioned e-mail sent to students? see: http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2014-... and the collection of heated pro/con responses which followed. Absolutely bizarre. Reminds me of the dismissal of the physicist David Bohm from Princeton in early 1950s orchestrated by then president Harold Dodds, a rabid anticommunist with close ties to the McCarthy era State Department who viewed Bohm as a Marxist unionist. May be what goes around comes around. Does Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks and a majority in the Math department happen to have close ties to Sacramento and AFSCME? If so the real rationale for proposed dismissal may be that the professor is deemed insufficiently Marxist unionist by the powers that be. Just glad I had the financial resources to eschew that institutional quagmire.
Doubtful. I was a student during that time and I can't recall any math or CS (or STEM) classes that cancelled a class session because of the strike. The most that happened was some teaching assistants cancelled their section for one day.
Started reading Peat's 'Infinite Potential - The Life and Times of David Bohm' yesterday and came across this post on HN. Knowing of the stir created by the 2013 e-mail, the possible parallels with events associated with Bohm's dismissal from Princeton (although for seemingly opposite political reasons) were striking. As an irrelevant aside, Bohm's 3-world intentionality/stochastic/objectified space hypothesis is interesting because it reduces the Schrödinger cat metaphor to a useful fiction.
